A very long article in the Weekly Standard details Mitch Daniels’ six (and counting) years as governor of Indiana.

You want to see how a conservative governs, how a conservative takes a failing state budget and brings it back into the black, and how a conservative makes the whole process go down like a spoonful of sugar? Author Andrew Ferguson travels around with Mitch:

Later I remarked to Daniels how the schools I’d seen in Indiana all had the same gleam and polish: immaculate athletic fields, vast cafeterias, swimming pools.

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s a problem.”

I’d meant to flatter him but he sounded appalled.

[snip]

Daniels was washing down a quarter-pound Coney Island dog with a large butterscotch milkshake—“the best in the state,” he assured Dolly, the delighted owner—when a reporter from the local radio station appeared. She pressed him on the education budget cuts too. She told him the local school board had just laid off nine teachers and an administrator.

“What would you say to those people?” she asked.

He visibly flinched, just as he had on MitchTV.

“I’d say it should have been nine administrators and one teacher. There are 20 things that school board could do before it had to lay off one teacher.”

[snip]

In the early days of the administration he had a hunch that the government owned more cars than it could use. Lieutenants were dispatched to the parking lots of state facilities to place pennies on a tire of each car. They returned in a month and if the pennies were still there, Kitchell told me, “We said, ‘Give us the keys.’?”

[snip]

Daniels’s popularity among Hoosiers, a thing majestic in its dimensions, took a while to grow. Well into his first term, odds on his reelection were heavily against him. “You can only do the kinds of things we were trying to do if you don’t really give a damn,” he told me last month. “I mean about reelection. I wouldn’t have liked to lose, and I’d hate to see everything we did reversed. But if I’d thought about that nothing would have gotten done.”

The Blade, as President Bush called him when Daniels was director of the OMB, has the fiscal clout and experience the nation needs desperately.

So is he going to run for president? I asked him at the end of a long dinner in a pleasant, not-too-expensive restaurant on the north side of Indianapolis, and he did what he’s been doing for a year whenever interviewers ask the inevitable question—pursed lips, followed by a half-smile, a slight shake of the head, and the recitation of a long string of phrases nearly identical to the ones he used eight years ago when he denied he was running for governor.

[snip]

“I really don’t want to run,” he said again. “It’s very important this time around that the party get it right. It’s not going to be enough to be the un-Obama. We need to focus more on the What of the campaign than the Who.” When he describes the What, though, it sounds tailored for a particular Who.

“What we’ve seen in the past year, what I call shock-and-awe statism, has put the American experiment at risk,” he said. “For the first time in my life, the country faces survival-level issues.”

Those would be, along with “terrorism in a WMD world,” the national debt and the recurring federal deficits.

“There are things that I would advance as a candidate that the playbook says are folly—suicidal,” he said. “We’d have to fundamentally change all the welfare and entitlement programs. What Bush tried to do [in proposing private accounts for Social Security] was mild compared to what needs to be done. You have to have a completely new compact for people under a certain age, for Medicare and Social Security. You’re gonna have to dramatically cut spending across the whole government, including, by the way, national defense. When Bush arrived, we were spending $300 billion on national defense, and he thought that was plenty. Now it’s, what, $800 billion?”

Beyond the debt and the deficit, in Daniels’s telling, all other issues fade to comparative insignificance. He’s an agnostic on the science of global warming but says his views don’t matter. “I don’t know if the CO2 zealots are right,” he said. “But I don’t care, because we can’t afford to do what they want to do. Unless you want to go broke, in which case the world isn’t going to be any greener. Poor nations are never green.”

Read the article to see a great Republican governor in action, and to see a man “at once so visible and so self-effacing that he seems to have sunk into a black hole of personal magnetism and come out the other side, where the very lack of charisma becomes charismatic.”